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A little bit of story:

I was planning on buying an SSD for my (old) laptop and wanted to know my laptop SATA ports. I plan to replace it with the optical drive using a caddy.

After a bit of research, I got to know that a SATA 3 connection efficiently uses an SSDs' speed. I was wondering what type of port my Optical Drive is connected in.

I referred to this answer, and I know that if a motherboard is SATA 3 based, then every port is SATA 3 (I might be off on the statement).

However, HWiNFO reports something else.

The Hard Drive: enter image description here

The optical Drive: enter image description here

What does this actually mean? Does my motherboard have different SATA connections? Will I be able to replace the Optical Drive with the SSD to avail its benefits?

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    It seems it's a general issue with laptop these days: superuser.com/q/1164497/880618, so i'm betting it's two different connections (SATA 1 - 1.5GB/s for the optical drive and SATA 3 - 6Gb/s for the harddrive). You can swap the harddrive and SSD to get the full benefit of the SSD. – CaldeiraG May 15 at 10:32
  • This seems like a poor design. How can a motherboard have two different port architectures? – MaJoR21 May 15 at 10:43
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    That screenshot shows his CD/DVD drive running at 1.5 while his hard drive supports SATA 3. It's important to note that he's looking at different values that have different meanings. The drive controller is being shown to be running at 6 Gbit (top line). A DVD drive simply doesn't have the throughput. – Seth May 15 at 10:44
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    It's actually a conscious design decision. Optical drives use only a fraction of SATA's throughput, so it makes sense to use the cheapest interface possible. – gronostaj May 15 at 10:46
  • So @Seth according to you, the port is capable of SATA-3 connections? By poor design, I mean an "old" design. Since CD/DVDs are old now and rarely used. Anyways this is an old laptop, I was expecting it to have decent number of ports. – MaJoR21 May 15 at 10:51
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You're looking at different values and you're comparing the wrong thing.

With the screenshots you're showing you're comparing the "Drive Controller Information" for your DVD drive (which does include the speed) to the "ATA Transport Version Supported". If you take a closer look the "Drive Controller Information" for your HDD/SSD is listed as running at 6 Gbps. Also you can infer that the DVD drive is running at 1.5 Gbps. 1 Gbps should be plenty to read a DVD and different connections for SATA can run at different speeds. It might be that the controller on the DVD drive doesn't support more. Depending on your model you might be unable to use that connection for something else, if you can you could attach a drive to check whenever it also supports 6 Gbps.

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  • The SSD is on its way so I cannot confirm this as the answer (maybe someone else who has more knowledge on this topic can). I definitely hope this is the case, as compared to the answers in the comments. Thank you for your time! :) – MaJoR21 May 15 at 10:56
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    You should look up both drives by their model number and verify if both are actually SATA 3 drives. – Ramhound May 15 at 11:46

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